Two days after the first 2012 Presidential Debate

Two days after the debate, a report says the jobless rate dropped to 7.8%, the lowest since 2009. This matches the rate when Obama took office. The number of unemployed in America is now 12.1 million.

“An overall better-than-expected jobs report, consistent with most recent data that suggest the economy is gaining some momentum,” said Sal Guatieri, an economist at BMO Capital Markets, in a note to clients. “The sizeable drop in the unemployment rate could lift the president’s re-election chances following a post-debate dip.”

There are now 325,000 more jobs than when Obama took office.

In fact, Democrats do better at putting people to work than Republicans — twice as many per year.

“… year by year, at the net change in jobs, for every year since 1953 (Eisenhower’s first year in office). This was defined as January 31 to January 31, to best coincide with the presidential term. Overall, nearly 48 million jobs were created under 23 years of Democratic presidents (over 2 million per year; I excluded 2012) and nearly 35 million under 36 years of Republican presidents (just under 1 million per year).”

In the last eighty years there have been five-major financial crises in the US and they all happened with a Republican president in the White House,” says Bob Deitrick, co-author of Bulls, Bears and the Ballot Box.

What about the rich getting richer? Who does a better job at boosting the wealth of the top one percent?

A. Democrats

B. Republicans

Rolling Stone Magazine offers the answer:

Today’s Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.

Modern-day Republicans have become, quite simply, the Party of the One Percent – the Party of the Rich.

Since Republicans rededicated themselves to slashing taxes for the wealthy in 1997, the average annual income of the 400 richest Americans has more than tripled, to $345 million – while their share of the tax burden has plunged by 40 percent. Today, a billionaire in the top 400 pays less than 17 percent of his income in taxes – five percentage points less than a bus driver earning $26,000 a year. “Most Americans got none of the growth of the preceding dozen years,” says Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. “All the gains went to the top percentage points.” Read more: Rolling Stone.com

His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

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